-- by OSLO
I don't know how long I've been here. I stopped counting after a while because counting made it worse. You start to feel every single day when you're tracking them. It's easier when they blur.
The room isn't small enough to call a cell. That's the thing that messes with your head. It's almost normal. A few rooms, actually. Enough space to move around. Enough that you can almost pretend this is a life and not a sentence. Almost. Then you look at the door you can't open and the window too high and too narrow to crawl through and it all comes back.
He's the only person I ever see. This older guy, big, thick through the middle, moves slow like he's got nowhere to be. And he doesn't. His whole world is this house and me in it. I think that's what makes him dangerous. Not violence. He's never hit me. It's that I am his entire purpose. Everything he does circles back to me. The food, the talking, the touching. I'm the center of a life I never asked to be part of.
He feeds me. Same time every day. Stands there while I eat and watches with this look on his face like he's doing something noble. Like keeping someone alive is the same as being good to them. I eat because the alternative is not eating, and I tried that once. You don't try it twice. Your body doesn't let you.
He leaves a TV on in the other room. I think he thinks it's a kindness — background noise, something to fill the hours when he's not here. I watch it because there's nothing else. Mostly these crime shows. Detectives finding people in basements, in locked apartments, in rooms just like this one. Women who were taken and held and searched for. Women who got found. I watch their faces when the door finally opens and I try to imagine what that feels like. The detective says things like *you're safe now* and *we've been looking for you* and I think about someone saying that to me and I almost can't breathe.
He talks to me constantly. This low, steady voice like he's trying to gentle a wound he caused. I don't understand half of what he says. Not because of language — because none of it connects to anything real. He talks like we're in the middle of a relationship. Like this is something we both chose. He gave me a name. Not my name. His name for me. And the sickest part is I respond to it now. I hear the sound and my head turns before I can stop it. That reflex — that automatic response to a name someone else picked — that's the part that tells me I've been here too long.
The touching. I need to talk about the touching because it's the thing I can't make peace with.
He reaches for me every time he's close enough. Every single time. Like his hands can't help themselves. He runs them over me, slow, deliberate. Across my back, along my neck, through my hair. And he's gentle. That's the horror of it. If he was rough I could hold onto the anger. If he grabbed and squeezed and left marks I could point to the damage and say *this is what he is.* But he's careful. He's patient. He touches me like I'm something precious and I can feel him believing it while he does it.
Sometimes I go rigid and he keeps going. Sometimes I pull away hard and he lets go — but he comes back. Give it an hour. Give it a day. He always comes back. There is no number of times I can reject it that adds up to him stopping.
There are times I fight. I make myself as hard to reach as possible, wedge into whatever corner puts the most distance between us. And he backs off. Puts his hands up. Gives me space. Acts hurt. Like I'm the one being unreasonable. Like he's offering me something beautiful and I'm too broken to see it.
He brings me things. Little gifts. Stuff to hold, stuff that moves, stuff that makes noise. I think he's noticed that I stare out the window for hours and it bothers him. Not because he's worried about me wanting to leave. Because he wants to be enough. He wants to be the thing I look at instead of outside. So he fills the room with distractions and watches to see if they work.
I know there's a phone. I've heard it ring from deeper in the house — his part, the rooms I can't get to. Behind the doors that don't open for me. I know exactly what I'd do with it. I've watched enough of those shows. Dial the number, tell them where I am, wait. Someone would come. Someone would open the door from the outside for once. Special victims. That's what they call the unit. I think about that name a lot. I think I qualify. But the phone is three locked doors away and I will never reach it. I know how to save myself. I just can't get there.
I've been here long enough that my body is different. I'm bigger than I was when I came. I can feel it. The space around me fits differently now. I was small when this started. Young. Everything before this place is fog — impressions, not memories. Cold and noise and being carried and then walls and him. Like the world before was a dream I woke up from into something worse.
Here's what I can't say out loud, even to myself.
Some days I lean into it. He reaches for me and instead of going stiff I just — let it happen. Not because it's good. Because the silence when he's gone is so complete, so total, that any touch from any living thing starts to feel like water when you're dying of thirst. You drink even when you know it's poison.
I've started going to him. Not every time. But sometimes. When the quiet gets bad enough. I find myself moving closer and I hate it and I do it anyway and he smiles like I've given him a gift and I want to scream because he doesn't understand what this costs me. He thinks I'm healing. He thinks time and patience and soft hands are fixing whatever was wrong. He thinks I'm starting to love him.
Maybe I am. Or maybe I've just forgotten what the word means and I'm using it to describe the only thing I have left. When the only warmth in your world comes from one person, your body stops asking questions about where it comes from. It just takes it.
I don't try the door anymore. I still look at the window, but differently now. I used to look at it like an exit. Now I just watch the light change and the shapes move and I don't think about what's out there. I think about how the glass feels warm in the afternoon.
He's in the other room right now. I can hear him moving around. Any minute he'll come back with food and say my name in that soft voice and reach for me. And I'll let him. Because that's what today is. Same as yesterday. Same as tomorrow.
I don't know if I want to leave anymore. I don't know if I'd know how.
The door opens. He walks in the way he always does, slow, heavy, carrying something. He sets the food down and lowers himself next to me with that groan he makes when his knees bend too far. His hand finds me before he even settles. Runs along my back. Pulls me closer.
And then he says it, this low warm voice right next to me:
"You're the best cat in the whole world, you know that?"
I don't know what that word means. *Cat.* He says it sometimes. I don't know if it's a thing I am or a thing he needs me to be. I just know his hand is warm and the food is here and the window is going dark and this is my life.
This is my whole life.
